


Radhog Day

by dianekepler



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: A Happy Ending For Once, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Recon Squad Gladius, Romance, Swearing, many ghouls, pointed cultural references, time loops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-30 17:38:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19408117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dianekepler/pseuds/dianekepler
Summary: Repeating events and recurring problems have the survivors of Recon Squad Gladius pinned down at Cambridge Police Station.





	Radhog Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hbrooks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hbrooks/gifts).



> This is for my bro. I love our writing group and I love hanging out every week. Thanks for continuing to be a solid friend.
> 
> This is also for everybody who's come out or is thinking of coming out. Happy pride. Because no matter what your circumstances or what year it is, this stuff is never easy.

The ghouls showed up at different times of day.

A single, wet _hraaaaaaa!_ was all it took to get the four of them outside, pushing as hard as they could against feral waves breaking against their perimeter. But no matter what they tried or how long they went at it, Keane would go down, Rhys would get hit, Haylen would fall back to dress his wounds, and Top would wind up as their last line of defense, grimly lasing away until the vault dweller snuck or ran or stumbled into their fight.

Sometimes it was night when this happened. Sometimes high noon.

The outsider was always different. Anything from a slob in mismatched armor to an idiot in bright blue. Short or tall, light or dark, armed with anything from pipe guns and tire irons to tech so sweet that Rhys just ached to get his hands on it. Sometimes, after the stranger inevitably bit it, Rhys would set up targets and practice with the new weapons until he ran out of ammo or it got dark.

Then they’d wake up the next morning and start all over again.

They all coped in different ways. Top spent hours in the garage tweaking his rifle or working on his power armor. Haylen pored over whatever terminals she could unlock — the passcodes changed every time — looking for clues about why they were caught like this. She also kept up morale in little ways. Like when it was her turn to heat up rations she’d cut the Cram into interesting shapes or pick the carrot flowers growing out of some crack in the roof and put them in a tin can on the table.

Keane's memory reset like everything else, so he never knew he was going to die each time. Which was something, at least.

Rhys kept his aim sharp. Exercised. Hucked chunks of concrete off the roof, seeing if he could get them through the windows of the building next door. Sometimes Top would would find his way up there and they'd stand around watching clouds or counting ravens. Rhys kept trying to get up the nerve to say how he felt or even just catch Top’s dark brown eyes, but he backed off every time.

It broke the monotony when the vault dwellers lasted long enough to come inside, but that bothered Rhys too. Most of them were assholes to begin with and plenty had useless jobs like lawyer or writer or social media influencer, whatever the hell that was. Worst of all were the ones who got this insane crush on Top maybe ten seconds after they met him. And then crush or not, asshole or not, Top wound up having to drag this total stranger along to ArcJet because Keane was gone and Rhys was hurt and Haylen had to hold down the fort. Having an extra gun, even an inept one, was the only way Top could pick up the transmitter they needed to raise Scabbard and report Gladius was secure.

Well, mostly secure. If you didn't count being stuck on repeat day after goddamn day.

Top said it was some kind of test. If they just learned all the patterns and did everything right, they could break out of this. Haylen said things like “quantum-initiated temporal displacement loop”. She drew a lot of squiggly-lined diagrams on that one blackboard in the room she’d set up as a lab. But Rhys never got it. Didn’t really care either. He just stood watch, hurled rocks, and pounded the Gwinnetts that would appear around the station every time their lives reset.

Since vaultie was the only thing that ever changed, Rhys started watching his back. Or her back. Or their back, since body armor and every variation of haircut sometimes made it tough to tell what was going on. More and more used to the nauseating levels of pain, Rhys would wave Haylen off after she’d stimmed him. He’d prop himself up against the police station and take out the ghouls swarming vaultie. One time, even with trauma to his gun hand, Rhys shoved his way past vaultie when it looked like he was going down and took a gouging bite to the flank. That left Haylen washing ghoul-sludge out of Rhys’s hand and out of a long gash above his ribs. And Rhys, hazy from the Med-X, suffered through it only to have Top come back from ArcJet around sunset looking sorry as hell blue-butt had died again.

Patterns were emerging, though. One was that vaultie never showed up ’til Rhys sustained some kind of injury. It got Rhys packing a 10-mil to sneak out and shoot himself in the foot. Hurt like a motherfucker, but it moved things along.

That was the night Rhys came closer than ever to laying it all out for Top, though in the end he chickenshitted out as usual. Even if Paladin Michael Danse somehow felt the same as Knight Evann Rhys, the Brotherhood of Steel didn’t tolerate same-sex relations. Rhys couldn’t do that to Top. Anyone who knew Danse knew the Brotherhood was his life.

Meanwhile those blue bastards kept showing up at the station. Rhys knew he was bitching too much. Cutting remarks would fly out of him at every set of doe eyes or sign of disrespect directed towards Top, forcing his superior to take Rhys aside and call out his pissy attitude. In the end, Rhys decided to keep his mouth shut. He had to do what was best for the mission. Best for Top.

The hundred and eleventh time, something changed.

The others said it was actually the hundred and eighth time. Rhys was tempted to believe it. Top had perfect recall and Haylen had even managed to rig a terminal so it wouldn’t reset like all the others. But it had to be 111 for that stupid gold number that showed up whenever vaultie didn’t have the sense to change out of bright blue. Nothing else made sense.

The vaultie that time was tubby. Not fat, but with more meat on him than any Wastelander had a right to have, and with an almost eerily calm attitude. Rhys would have disliked him for those things alone, if he hadn't been so phenomenal with his melee weapon -- some kind of short staff with a ball at each end. Took out practically the whole ghoul horde on his own. Plus when the stranger looked at someone, he really looked. Didn’t glare, or skate his eyes past Rhys and Haylen and Keane's body like none of them mattered. Instead he included all of them in the spell of his gaze. So Rhys warmed to the scavver, despite the man’s freakishly long earlobes and that mole just above the bridge of his nose.

“I’ll say it once,” he said to Rhys for the minute or so they were alone in the front room. Top was in the garage, digging a ghoul-bone out of a joint in his power armor and Haylen was on the roof, making sure the turrets were okay. “You need to look for what matters most.”

That didn't make a lot of sense. Plus vaultie kept spinning around himself in repeating images, like he was at the far end of the kaleidoscope Rhys had seen one time in Rivet City.

“Where’s Sid?” Haylen asked when she came back down.

Rhys said something brainy like, “The garage?”

But he wasn't with Top either. The vaultie, it turned out, had just up and gone for a stroll. They never saw him again.

It took Rhys a lot of repeats to get over that. Their melee magician -- the one who could have handled every synth at ArcJet with no gun while Top cased the building for everything from bottles of beer to spare packs of Fancy Lads -- had walked out on them. They would never get a chance at that transmitter! Rhys and Top and Haylen were going to be stuck here forever!

About a week after Day 108, or 111, or whatever the fuck was the night Rhys came closest to admitting anything. He'd started doing the leftover chems from Keane’s hip pocket. It was ghoulish to steal from the fallen, but Rhys could barely stand the taste of Gwinnett Lager anymore. He was at the end of his rope. And with Top, on the roof, and every star doubled from what Day Tripper plus alcohol did to his vision, Rhys was experiencing a profound sense of fuck-it-all-to-hell.

"Danse," he said, using his name instead of his rank. There were cricket sounds and wind was in the trees. "Do you ever …."

But that was as far as he got. Even chemmed up like he was, anything less than 'I love you too' felt like it would hurt too much.

It was Haylen, in the end, who spoke up.

They were in her lab-room. She’d been staring at her terminal a long time and didn’t look away from it when she said. “You know, Sid told me something before he left.”

"He was alone with you?" Rhys asked. Haylen

"Just for a minute. You were crashed out when we took you in and Danse was still … you know."

Rhys nodded. It was one of the things his mind skipped over, Top burying Keane every time. Digging graves was a lot easier with power armor. Still, that had to weigh on a person.

But Haylen maybe didn't see the nod. She was still watching the blinking square on her terminal, blushing so hard it nearly evened out her freckles. "He said to look for what's toughest. And I thought about that for awhile. And what I never do is speak up when something's going on, so …."

Then she turned towards Rhys. “Maybe you should tell him.”

"Tell him what?" He pushed up from the cot where he'd been resting, suddenly furious. He’d just been lying there, counting the minutes until the stims and the Med-X wore off so he could get into the chemmier part of the day.

"Please," she chewed her lip, "I know it's none of my business. I just …."

"You can save it!" Rhys said, hating himself. "Or if it's so damn important, tell Top!"

"Don't you get it? He would never --." She took a breath and her whole body shook. Then she stood up. “I’m sorry — I can't. I'm sorry."

Everything beyond the cot blurred. Rhys squeezed his eyes shut, his heart going a hundred times a minute or faster. Never what? Never lower himself, probably. Never bother telling Rhys to stop wasting his time.

Except that night, sleepless despite all the beer, it didn’t sit right. Top volunteered for lots of tough or dirty or dangerous jobs, including having uncomfortable conversations if it helped someone. The brothers even got on him for it sometimes. Why should a paladin do what any knight —

And Rhys stopped.

Because that was what Haylen meant. There were some things an officer, at least a by-the-Codex officer like Top, could never ask.

Maybe that was why Rhys stopped by garage, where he never usually went because he could barely stand looking at the buttoned-up version of Top, never mind the one with his uniform sleeves tied around his waist and his T-shirt showing, if not all that was good about Danse, plenty that was.

Maybe, because Rhys was dead sober by that time of night, Top listened a bit harder.

And maybe because Rhys didn’t jump him or hound him about what they should do when Top admitted he felt the same — since, aside from being professionals, they still had to figure out how to escape the damn time loop — maybe that was what held Top together later on. Just knowing. Maybe that's what kept him alive between the moment he ran from the Brotherhood and Rhys could slip away to join him at Listening Post Bravo. Maybe that was why Top knew in his bones Rhys didn’t fucking care if he was a synth or not.

Later on, in Sanctuary, Rhys would ask Top what those dark hours had been like. Actually not Top or Paladin or even Danse, since they weren’t brothers anymore, just outcasts hanging on as tight as they could. And sometimes Michael would tell him something that made sense. Other times they’d end up arguing or fucking or just sitting around with their feet up for the twenty-or-so minutes nobody needed either of them in the settlement.

Because life outside the Brotherhood was harder than either of them imagined. With meds and clean water so hard to come by, with having to watch for raiders every minute of every day, little things got to Rhys. Like how the version of vaultie who’d helped the Minutemen destroy the Institute was even bigger asshole than most. But on the other hand, it was partly because of vaultie that Evann and Michael had each other. And even on the most backbreaking, hair-tearing days, he could at least say he wasn’t stuck anymore.

Maybe, in the end, that was what mattered most.


End file.
